Brazilians prefer bread to circuses

Brazilians prefer bread to circuses

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Brazilians are soccer crazy, but not that crazy.

That’s the message protesters in their hundreds of thousands, from Sao Paolo to Rio de Janeiro to Belem, have for their political masters who foisted the football (soccer to North Americans) 2014 World Cup on the country.

The government in Brasilia promised hosting the event would boost state coffers by billions of dollars, with a trickle-down effect that would be felt by all citizens.

That hasn’t happened. Now, the event is being seen for what it really is: a billion-dollar boondoggle, in which Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and Sepp Blatt bleed the country dry.

Next up, the 2016 Olympics, another drain on the host’s coffers, both for the cost of staging the events and payments to the International Olympics Committee.

Both events have a $13-billion price tag, a figure that is sure to bear no relation to reality. Meanwhile, Brazilians are seeing their taxes raised, but are getting little in return. Inflation and crime are soaring. The 10¢ increase on bus fares was just the last straw.

Pepe Escobar, a roving correspondent for the Russian website RT, says people of all classes feel they are being robbed.

Football passion apart – and this is a nation where everyone is either an expert football player or an experienced coach – the vast majority of the population is very much aware the current Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup are monster FIFA rackets. As a columnist for the Brazilian arm of ESPN has coined it, “the Cup is theirs, but we pay the bills.”

Public opinion is very much aware the feds played hardball to get the “mega-events” to Brazil and then promised rivers of “social” benefits in terms of services and urban development. None of that happened. Thus the collective feeling that “we’ve been robbed” – all over again, as anyone with a digital made in China calculator can compare this multi-billion dollar orgy of public funds for FIFA with pathetically little investment in health, education, transportation and social welfare.

Rogério Simões, executive editor of Epoca magazine, tells CNN protests about bus fares are a normal feature of Brazilian life. What’s different this time around is that the demonstrators come from all levels of society, not just the poor.

In the beginning, they were few, mostly youngsters disgruntled with a 20-centavos (10¢) rise in bus and train fares. After a violent response from the police, they were joined by Brazilians of all ages who had their own issues to shout about. … corruption, poor public services, increasing inflation, lack of security and the not-so-much-loved-anymore World Cup.

At a time when Brazil was supposed to be celebrating, the streets were full of anger, chanting, confrontation with the police and destruction, produced by a minority of radical demonstrators.

The recent protests were led by a different bunch: The traditional middle class. On the streets, well-educated people, from central, urban areas, shouted that they had been sold a lie.

In a report for the Gulf News, Conor Foley blames politicians for failing to allocate funds to education, health care and transportation, while awarding themselves healthy pay increases.

While it is tempting to blame all this on government corruption, another slogan of the protesters, clearly there are also choices to be made about spending priorities. [The federal government has] targeted spending on social programs, such as Bolsa Familia, which have succeeded in lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty, but failed to tackle other grossly wasteful and regressive elements of state spending. The opposition shows a similar lack of enthusiasm for such reforms.

However, without reform, the protests are likely to continue and this is exposing further fault lines in the relationship between the government and the governed. One of the most debated actions carried out by the police during their violent clampdown in Sao Paulo was the arrest of people for carrying vinegar. This is a perfectly lawful and nonviolent activity. Its subversive intent lies in that it can be used to lessen the impact of teargas, canisters of which the police fired arbitrarily into crowds of commuters.

At The Guardian, Simon Jenkins says the protests throw light on the snowballing costs of staging such events as the Olympics or the recent Group of Eight meeting in Northern Ireland.

The World Cup and the Olympics are television events that could be held at much less expense and ballyhoo in one place. As it is, host nations are deluged with promises of “legacy return” that everyone knows are rubbish. Costs escalate to an extent that would see most managers in handcuffs, but gain bonuses and knighthoods for Olympic organizers.

Sport is not alone in this addiction to the jamboree. The London Olympics last year morphed into politics, as diplomacy, culture and trade were conflated in an outpouring of nonsensical rhetoric about £13-billion [$21-billion] in contracts. A summit used to be a meeting ad hoc to resolve a crisis in world affairs. It is now a Field of Cloth of Gold, a continuous round of hospitality, rest and recuperation, flattering the vanity of world leaders.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.